Coronary artery disease is a common ailment that affects millions of people. Coronary artery disease may cause the blood vessels providing blood to the heart to develop lesions, such as a stenosis (abnormal narrowing of a blood vessel). As a result, blood flow to the heart may be restricted. A patient suffering from coronary artery disease may experience chest pain, referred to as chronic stable angina during physical exertion or unstable angina when the patient is at rest. A more severe manifestation of disease may lead to myocardial infarction, or heart attack. Significant strides have been made in the treatment of coronary artery disease including both medical therapy (e.g. statins) or surgical alternatives (e.g., percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG)). Invasive assessments are commonly used to assess the type of treatment a patient may receive. However, indirect or noninvasive assessments for formulating a patient treatment are being explored and developed.
Heart disease is typically viewed as resulting from vessel disease, in particular, narrowing or blockage inside vessel lumens in a way that impacts blood flow. Currently, assessments to estimate perfusion may use perfusion scans, which may be costly and may expose the patient to unnecessary radiation. Thus, a desire exists to extend the functional analysis of fractional flow reserve (FFR) techniques to the perfused organ (i.e. the myocardium), and generate three dimensional (3D) models having a microvascular resolution, from the anatomical scans using available patient information to estimate a perfusion in a target tissue.
The foregoing general description and the following detailed description are exemplary and explanatory only and are not restrictive of the disclosure. For the purposes of the disclosure: “patient” may refer to any individual or person for whom diagnosis or treatment analysis is being performed, or any individual or person associated with the diagnosis or treatment analysis of one or more individuals; “electronic storage medium” may include, but is not limited to, a hard drive, network drive, cloud drive, mobile phone, tablet, or the like that may or may not be affixed to a display screen; “target tissue” may refer to the tissues and/or organ in which the blood supply may be estimated; and “imaging or scanning modalities” may refer to one or more techniques or processes used for visual representation, including but not limited to computerized tomography (CT), coronary computed tomography angiography (cCTA), positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT), magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, stress echo, correlation data and/or magnetic resonance (MR) imaging.